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Another area where too often technologies have not been designed to fit with the social or the natural systems is the introduction of technologies into low-income countries. The past uses of inappropriate western technologies have caused many environmental problems in low-income countries. In fact, dependence on western technologies is seen as posing economic and self-sufficiency problems. Technology transfer is the term generally used to describe the transfer of technologies from high-income industrialised nations to low-income nations. In the past, technology transfer has been seen as a way of helping these nations to industrialise and thereby to increase their living standards. Now, it is also being seen as a way of ensuring that development in poor countries does not occur at the expense of the environment. The idea is to transfer new, clean technologies to these countries cheaply so that they do not use outdated, polluting technologies to generate their wealth. Organisations, such as transnational corporations and the Business Council for Sustainable Development, prefer to use the term 'technological co-operation'. They believe that the development of investment opportunities in low-income countries will not only allow them to be competitive in new markets but will aid in the development of western-style technologies in low-income countries. (The term 'western' refers here to complex, technically sophisticated technologies generally developed in high-income countries to meet the needs of employers in those countries for centralised, capital-intensive, labour-displacing technologies.) The common view is that there is a need for the environmentally sound technologies developed in high-income countries to be transferred to low-income countries (usually facilitated by the provision of financial resources). This is seen as necessary in order to prevent the environmental crises that might accompany the attempts of these countries to attain via economic growth the living standards and lifestyles taken for granted in affluent countries. Anthony Tabor, from Monash University, says that United Nations reports envisage that the transfer of environmental technologies to low-income countries will achieve the following objectives:
A fourth possible objective&emdash;which could involve changing technology practices and the associated economic and social structures (such as tackling public transport or urban design)&emdash;tends to be neglected. Therefore, people have tended to focus on patents, costs, and access to information as the barriers to technology transfer rather than social or political factors. The view that western technology can provide the solutions to sustainable development in poor countries runs counter to recent experience. An example is the Bataan nuclear power plant bought from the USA company Westinghouse and built in the Philippines at a cost of $2.3 billion. It is alleged that Westinghouse paid $US80 million as commissions to close associates of ex-president Ferdinand Marcos (Todd 1990, p. 13). The reactor has never operated, because it is built in an earthquake zone and has serious design flaws&emdash;yet the Philippines is still paying it off. The nuclear industry is pushing nuclear power as a way of reducing greenhouse emissions in developing countries. Nuclear power is therefore a possible candidate for technology transfer in the interests of the global climate. Ian Smillie, an ex-director of a Canadian voluntary aid agency, has deplored the results of technology transfer which, he says, has resulted in 'vast numbers of inappropriate tractors and threshers and factories' being shipped to low-income countries 'at ever-increasing prices, to be used at a fraction of capacity or to end prematurely, simply rusting in the rain' (quoted in McCully 1991, pp. 247&endash;8). An example reported by McCully in the Ecologist is a road built in Somalia in 1983 by an Italian contractor for $100 million. Five years later, the road was impassable; yet the loan will take forty years to repay. McCully also cited a leaked document from the British Overseas Development Administration that admitted that three out of six power stations they have funded and which were built mainly by British companies were 'seriously unreliable'. The transfer of technologies to low-income countries has been rather unsuccessful in terms of transferring the technological know-how and ensuring that equipment is operated and maintained successfully after it has been installed. The leaked document said that local people would be unable to run the equipment in a power plant built in Bangladesh, and that they were unlikely to be able to learn to. Moreover, obsolete and harmful technologies have often been offloaded onto poor countries when they are not wanted or are even prohibited in high-income countries. Pesticides and drugs are the most well-known examples in these categories. Additionally, manufacturing operations in low-income countries sometimes operate to lower standards, so that the potential for life-threatening accidents and routine environmentally damaging emissions is far greater. The tendency in the past has been to transfer large-scale, complex, capital- intensive, labour-saving technologies to low-income countries. This means effectively that aid money returns to the high-income countries to pay them for their supply of equipment and skilled personnel. Countries donating aid often tie the money to the purchase of goods from their own country. As McCully argues: "Such tied aid is notorious for resulting in imports of overpriced goods and inappropriate or obsolete technologies as well as for favouring capital- rather than labour-intensive projects in areas with high unemployment and scarce financial resources. It gives little stimulus to local suppliers, and the maintenance, staffing and administration costs are usually left to the recipient county to pay, normally in foreign exchange to the donor country." (p. 246) In contrast, what are needed are small-scale, cheap, adaptable, labour-intensive technologies that are more suited to nations with not much money but many willing hands. While western technologies tend to be centralised and to offer advantages to those with power and wealth, technologies that are more decentralised, localised and integrated may be more appropriate to the poor. Such technologies tend not to be developed in affluent countries. Often, the solution to an environmental problem can be found in changes to the social structures and institutions rather than in new forms of technology. The protection of common areas of land, for example, may involve changes in management and governance rather than new forms of crops or trees, or methods of restoring ecosystems. Similarly, Tabor argues, governments tend to place 'an emphasis on industrial pollution and sophisticated new plant, rather than on enhancing the ability of the poor to manage the natural resources on which their livelihoods depend, in a sustainable manner' (1993, p. 15). Instead, western technologies often displace indigenous peoples from their traditional means of making a living. He claims that western-style industrialisation has contributed to the creation of both a prosperous urban elite and a rural poor, which leads to the mass migration of people from the countryside to the cities and therefore to increased urban poverty and unemployment, Also, natural resources are overexploited, there is an increase in technological and economic dependence, and indigenous technologies are neglected. It is now also being recognised that it is not enough to hand over engineering drawings or to sell equipment that has been designed for other localities. There is a need for technologies to be flexible. People need to trained to be able to 'creatively adapt, innovate and invent new technologies appropriate to their needs and societies' (Pearce, F. 1992g, p. 38). Indian industrialist S. Varadaragan points out that: "We in India need things that we can repair, not black boxes that have to be replaced. We need to install technology slowly, in stages. And there should be some link between the introduced technology and the local community. The local area should provide some resource, or the process should use some local knowledge."(quoted in Pearce, F. 1992g, p. 38) Edward Kufour of Ghana, speaking for low-income countries, argues that there needs to be some sort of technology assessment process to help these countries make appropriate technological choices that are environmentally and socially sound. Not only do low-income countries need to develop 'the capacity to receive, maintain, master, adapt and develop technologies' but they also must have the ability to carry out environmental impact and risk assessments. According to Fred Pearce (1992g, p. 36), the meaning of technology transfer 'remains ill-defined, and it rests on dangerous premises. It feeds the Western image of itself as the fount of technological wisdom.' Anil Agarwal of India's Centre for Science and the Environment argues that 'those Western countries who have been the most immoral in environmental terms are now preaching to those who have been most frugal and sparing' (p. 36). In fact, the technology transfer process has been going on in a two-way direction, although this has not always been acknowledged. Crops and plants cultivated in low-income countries over centuries are being collected by scientists from high-income nations as a rich source of genetic material that can be developed and patented. An example is a strain of cowpea cultivated in northern Nigeria that is very resistant to weevils. The International Institute of Tropical Agriculture took a sample back to England and isolated the gene responsible, patented it and sold licences to seed companies to use in various crops. It is unlikely that Nigerian farmers will ever get any financial benefit from the profits that will one day come out of this 'discovery'. This is why people in low-income countries get angry when biodiversity is treated as a global heritage, because they see it as a way of others not having to pay for their local resources and knowledge. Anil Agarwal says, 'the high-sounding plea of common heritage of humankind is a rhetorical device to disguise continued exploitation' (p. 38). It is only now being realised that the local knowledge of natives in the Amazonian rainforest about the medicinal and other qualities of plant and animal species is valuable to modern societies. But other skills and knowledge that local or indigenous peoples have about living in harmony with nature tends to be devalued. For example, local varieties of plants developed over centuries are often especially well fitted to their local ecosystem. Yet those varieties are being lost as they are replaced with the new high-yield varieties developed in other parts of the world by scientists. These new varieties require large amounts of expensive fertilisers and, because they are poorly adapted to local insects and plant life, they also need large amounts of pesticides and herbicides. Chee Yoke Ling, speaking on behalf of the Third World Network at one of the conferences leading up to the Earth Summit, argued that high-income countries had much to learn from technologies which had evolved in low-income countries to ensure the sustainable use and management of resources such as fisheries and forestry. He argued that, while the technological capacity of low-income countries was being developed, there also had to be recognition of 'the knowledge systems and experience of traditional communities' (Ling 1991, p. 30). However, traditional technologies tend to lose out against modern western technologies because of the economic, social and political systems in individual countries and outside them. Local elites in low-income nations prefer the western technologies that favour people with money. High-income nations prefer to give aid in a form that benefits their own suppliers of technology.
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Technology
Transfer